Canada not preparing for new rules for Congolese conflict minerals, says NGO

Kinshasa’s streets are laden with Francophonie summit banners, a new highway to the city’s international airport has been completed and security isn’t any worse than normal, said Joanne Lebert, who is in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s capital for the global meeting of French-speaking states Thursday.

“People seem to be quite pumped,” said Lebert, director of the Great Lakes Programme for Partnership Africa Canada (PAC), an Ottawa-based NGO.

Once Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Minister of State for La Francophonie Bernard Valcourt arrive in the city, they’ll venture beyond the usual cultural topics that dominate the meeting and talk human rights and resource governance with civil society advocates.

Through both the federal government and the private sector, Canada has long played a role in the complex web of mining companies, military forces and weak governance that have storied the DRC’s shaky handle on its minerals wealth for decades.

And while a new effort to end the so-called trade in “conflict minerals” from the eastern DRC is about to reach a milestone, Canada hasn’t done enough to prod companies to become more transparent, said Lebert.

“Canada should be more proactive in supporting Canadian companies to essentially carry out their due diligence,” she said.

Harper will be meeting with Congolese NGOs at some point during the summit, Lebert has heard, but she has her own meeting with Valcourt where she’ll discuss the progress her group, Partnership Africa Canada, has made on the region’s most advanced effort to stop the trade in conflict minerals.

Over the past several years, the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region has slowly been creating a system whereby a shipment of ore leaving the DRC or any of its neighbors would need an export certificate proving the minerals doesn’t come from mines run by military forces.

An agreement between the eleven member states has been signed but only the DRC and Rwanda have put them into law domestically. They go hand in hand with recent standards on due diligence for conflict minerals released by the OECD, which spell out in detail how companies can claim they’ve done their homework.

With Rwanda expected to release the first certificates next month, companies need to quickly adapt to the new requirements, she said.

“Canada has a role in making clear what those obligations are and holding Canadian companies to their standards,” said Lebert.

There are dozens of Canadian mining companies operating in the DRC and its neighbors, which include mineral rich countries like Tanzania and Zambia.

Ottawa has given $1.7 million over two years to PAC to help it implement the ICGLR’s certificate system.

“Quite frankly, its very nominal,” said Lebert. “It’s a very small, very targeted amount to support the ICGLR technical expertise.”

A Foreign Affairs official testified during a parliamentary committee hearing last October that Canada has put in $3 million to stopping conflict minerals in the region.

“It needs to be sustained a bit longer to get all the other countries on board,” said Lebert about the amount PAC receives.

The new ICGLR requirements go hand in hand with the recent transparency rules embedded in the U.S. Dodd-Frank Act that were announced in August, which force manufacturing firms registered on U.S. exchanges to prove they don’t source from conflict minerals.

The due diligence certificates can be used in the reporting obligations of Dodd-Frank, said Lebert.

Some downstream manufacturing firms have been testing out the export certificate requirement, she said.

But with the system expected to go online next month, Lebert hopes governments like Canada’s will realize the necessity of informing industry.

“There’s still some stumbling blocks technically, a few stumbling blocks politically,” she said. “We’re getting there and I think when Rwanda issues (the first certificates) it’s going to be tremendously symbolic.”

“It’s a difficult operating environment – a difficult political environment – but there is progress and hopefully we’ll see more progress soon,” she said.